Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea

Hesiod describes the negative powers of the children of Night,
and then lists the descendants of Pontus, beginning with the eldest
and most venerable, Nereus, the Sea's Ancient or the Old Man of
the Sea: "But Pontos, the great Sea, was Father of truthful
(apseudes) Nereus, who tells no lies (alethes),
eldest of his sons. They call him the old Gentleman because he is
trustworthy (nemertes), and gentle, and never forgetful of
what is right (oude themisteon lethetai), but the thoughts
of his mind are mild and righteous (dikaia kai epia)"
(Theogony 233-36). Three epithets, alethes,
apseudes and nemertes, confer exceptional
importance on Nereus. The association of these three epithets is in
all likelihood traditional, since we also find them linked in this
way in the description of the highest form of mantic speech, that
of Apollo. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, when Hermes
speaks before the gods, he claims in an ad hominem
argument addressed to Apollo that he has the same virtues as those
usually associated with his rival (368-69). He declares that he
will speak Aletheia and that he is nemertes and
apseudes. The "truth" of the Old an of the Sea
thus seems to cover two domains: prophecy and justice. To
understand the nature of this truth, we must first decipher the
relations between Aletheia and both mantic speech and
justice and then specify the modalities of the justice dispensed by
the Old Man of the Sea. To discover Nereus's "truth"
it is necessary to investigate the institutions intimately
connected to the Old Man of the Sea.

In Hesiod's Theogony, Nereus administers justice.
However, for an entire tradition he embodied a mantic power whose
wisdom the Ancients always praised and whose
"pronouncements" were carefully preserved and passed on
(for example, Pindar's Pythian 3.93). The occasion on
which he was consulted are famous, including those of Hercules and
Pars. Nereus was, moreover, at the head of a lineage of oracular
deities: his daughter, Eido, was called Theonoe because "she
knew all divine things, the present and the future, a privilege she
inherited from her forebear Nereus."(Euripides,
Helena 13ff.) When Glaucus, a member of the same family of
sea gods, appeared to the Argonauts, he declared himself to be the
prophet of the Old Man of the Sea, the husband of Panteidyia, the
All-Knowing One, and an apseudes interpreter. Nereus-like
deities, such as Phorkys, Glaucus and Pontus, the Halios
Geron, were all related, or even identified, through their
mantic function.

Aletheia occupied a place of great importance in the
realm of mantic speech (or prophecy). Evidence shows that the
authority of mantic knowledge and pronouncements was derived from a
particular concept of the truth. In the Homeric Hymn to
Hermes, the ancient deities assigned to Hermes by Apollo are
the Bee-Women who go everywhere, making all kinds of things
"happen": endowed with a mantic knowledge, they speak
Aletheia. The oracle of the Ismenion is known as the
alethes seat of diviners (Pindar, Pythian 11.6).
When Tiresias refers to his knowledge, he speaks of his
Aletheia(Sophocles, Oedipus the King 299, 356,
369). Nocturnal oracles summoned up by Gaia speak
Alethosune (Euripides, Iphigeneia in Tauris
1256-67, 1276-79). Cassandra is alethomantis Aeschylus,
Agamemnon 1241). Some dream visions also belong to
Aletheia. Finally, Olympia is "a queen of
Aletheia," because there "men of prophecy,
consulting Zeus' sacrificial fire, probe his will! God of the
white-flashing bolt, what has he to say of his contenders,
struggling for glory, breathless until they hold it?" (Pindar,
Olympian 8.1-3). Furthermore, according to some
traditions, Aletheia was the name of one of the nurses of
the great oracular god Apollo (Plato, Phaedrus 275).
Nereus, privileged by his possession of the most ancient oracular
knowledge, is most certainly a righteous master of
Aletheia.

The Aletheia of the Old Man of the Sea refers not only
to his prophetic power; it is also why he is "never forgetful
of what is right" and "the thoughts of his mind are mild
and righteous" (Th 235-36): in other words, his
function as a purveyor of justice. Like his daughter Theonoe,
Nereus is "a living sanctuary, an August temple of
Dike" (Euripides, Helena 1002). In religious
thought a distinction does not exist between the domains of justice
and truth. The many affinities between Dike and
Aletheia are well attested. When Epimenides goes in broad
daylight to the cave of Zeus Diktaios, where he then dreams for
many years, he converses with the hods and speaks with
Aletheia and Dike. This association is so natural
that Hesychius defines Aletheia as dikaia,
"things of Dike." Furthermore, through a play on
the words Chronos and Kronos, Plutarch tells us that Kronos is said
to be the father of Aletheia, do doubt because he is
naturally "the most just one" (dikaiotatos:
Plutarch, Questiones romanae 12.266ff.)
Aletheia's power is basically the same as
Dike's: Aletheia "who knows in silence
what is going to happen and what has happened," corresponds to
Dike, who knows "all things divine, the present and
the future" (Euripides, Helena 13ff.). At this level
of thought no distinction exists between truth and justice. The
power of Aletheia thus encompasses the twofold domain of
prophecy and justice.

The double field in which the Aletheia of the Old Man
of the Sea operates makes it possible to define the forms of
justice over which he presides: to wit, judicial procedures that
involve and, to a point, are confused wit forms of divination. This
type of judgment was not unusual and was still current in the sixth
century B.C. in Megara, where Theognis declares, "I must judge
this case exactly as with a line and a ruler, and give both parties
their just due by consulting the diviners, the birds, and the
burning altars, so as to spare myself the shame of making a
mistake." (Theognis, 543ff) Gods, however, such as
Nereus, Proteus and Glaucus live in the depths of the sea, from
which they dispense a special kind of justice. To consult Glaucus,
one had to set out in a boat; the god would rise from the waves
when he was ready to prophesy.

These gods were patrons of a sea justice. Ancient ritual
ordeals. When a conflict arose between Minos, gilt of violating a
virgin, and Theseus, who defended the girl, the matter was decided
by a "miracle duel." Theseus dove into the waves and
recovered the ring he had just hurled to the bottom of the ocean.
He thus penetrated the world of the gods and proved his own
divinity by surfacing in the waters, safe and in possession of the
ring. For the Greeks, the sea was a kind of Beyond. To return from
these waters, one needed the assent of the gods.

Among these sea ordeals, one episode emphasizes its nature as
ordeal by immersion. In Book IV of the Histories,
Herodotus recounts the tale of Phronim, the wise virgin, slandered
by her stepmother and given by her father to the merchant Themison,
the dispenser of justice. Once at sea, he attached a rope to the
girl, flung her into the waves, then pulled her out alive. The sea
had pronounced its verdict. Solon's contemporaries still
believed that the undisturbed sea represented "justice for
all." This same historical and religious context nurtured and
strengthened the belief that a safe sea crossing stood for
innocence. The Old Man of the Sea embodied the gravest and most
solemn form of justice, that by ordeal.

The Old Man of the Sea is a model of sovereignty, especially in
his "political" aspects. Of his fifty daughters, most
bearing names associated with navigation and sea trading, a dozen
or so bear the names of "political virtues." The
Theogony provides even more information about Nereus. He
is given two telling epithets. First he is the Old One, the
presbutatos par excellence (Th 234). In contrast
to Geras, accursed Old Age, Nereus symbolizes the
beneficent side to agedness. He embodies the principle of authority
that elderly men naturally receive. Hesiod's other epithet for
Nereus, "gentle," "kindly" (epios),
reinforces and expands on the first.